Reviving the Blood
by RoseFrederick
Summary: In a world of the Blood that also had its fair share of crazy cultists and mad scientists, a Black Widow who was both spun a tangled web and saw an unpleasant future. Manticore and X5-452 were her answer to the vision. (This is a fusion, no BJT characters appear.)


**Reviving the Blood**

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A/N: This is a conceptual fusion of the Black Jewels universe with the characters and some aspects of the setting from Dark Angel. For those unfamiliar, BJ has a lot of content related to fixed gender roles and sexual coercion & violence, including of underage characters. Although those themes are not focal aspects of this story, they will be alluded to in some places, so this story is being labeled choose not to warn. Proceed at your own discretion.

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A/N 2: Primer or Everything You NTK about BJT(hopefully)

The Blood have magical powers passed down to them by a mostly-extinct ancient race of dragons. They channel those powers through Jewels granted to them during two special ceremonies - a Birthright Ceremony when they are an adolescent and an Offering to the Darkness when they reach maturity. The Darkness is some combination of nebulous religious force and a well of power they draw from called the Abyss, and the color of Jewel an individual receives corresponds to the Web of Power in the Abyss they can descend to, i.e. how much power they can draw without breaking their mind or their powers. The spectrum descends as follows: White/Yellow/Tiger Eye/Rose/Summer-sky/Purple Dusk/Opal/Green/Sapphire/Red/Gray/Ebon-gray/Black/Ebony where Opal is the dividing line between lighter and darker Jewels. Their society is very regimented along gender lines; women are witches and may be called Witches, Priestesses, Healers, Black Widows, and Queens where most titles denote special statuses and abilities. Queens are meant to rule over and stabilize the land and the people and form courts around themselves for support and protection. Black Widows can do spell work that involves weaving Tangled Webs which may provide visions of possible futures, set stronger types of spells, or produce elaborate illusions. Warlords are the male equivalent of witches and are divided into Warlords, Princes, and Warlord Princes, though they mainly differ in harsher temperament and territoriality, rather than having distinct powers.

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It had been an open secret for some time that the Blood was in a state of slow, continuous decline across the past several generations. At least for those who were in a sufficient position of power to notice such things. Whispers and rumors had escalated into openly voiced worries and meetings theorizing on the potential causes and any possible solutions. There were no clear answers bar a general resolve: something had to be done before the puissance of the Blood slipped away entirely. Each year, fewer and fewer hopefuls to the Birthright Ceremony walked away from the Dark Altars with Jewels that had the potential to reach the darker ranks at maturity. Fewer and fewer witches manifested the abilities to become Healers or Black Widows. Fewer and fewer warlords were dominant enough to be Princes or Warlord Princes.

With the conviction action must be taken agreed upon, the government of one of the largest nations put together a group of scientists. Their mission would be to study the generative properties of the Blood's abilities, determine why the decline was taking place, and formulate a plan of how to stop it. As one of their first real breakthroughs was the discovery that no similar decline was taking place among the Blood of the kindred races, the group came to call themselves Manticore.

Unfortunately it was their last major discovery for some time, and those running the project began to despair. Despite extensive studies conducted in secretwith no concern for the test subjects or legality, they could pinpoint no reason for the decline nor begin to formulate a way to combat it. Only when a Black Widow named Sandeman came to them with a radical new plan was there any hope of further progress. A brilliant geneticist, she boldly declared that given enough time and funding, she could splice together genes from the unwavering kindred lines with human genes to create hybrids to restrengthen the Blood. Not just in a general sense, but she claimed that given enough funding and a base gene pool from a wide enough selection of subjects, she expected to be able to predict the specific Jewel strength and other abilities of the hybrids she would create. It was a revolutionary claim and met with high skepticism; none of their own scientists had been able to find any indications of a genetic origin to their powers, though many had tried. Predicting the potential of a single individual sounded like a complete fairy tale.

With no more realistic hopes to fix the situation, however, Mantcore's Committee of Directors agreed to provide whatever she asked for to begin her experiments. Sandeman showed no more qualms than her predecessors in the acquisition and treatment of subjects, whether their DNA was stolen or they were used as surrogates. She also showed no particular disappointment or emotion when her first efforts came out as monstrous creatures that bore no significant resemblance to kindred or man, many of whom had to be put down as complete failures. Some had no psychic strength at all and some earned dark birthright Jewels; the former were useless except as dissections on what had gone wrong and most of the latter were unstable and dangerous, having to be put down before reaching an age where they might use their strength to turn on their creators.

The more hybrid creatures she made, the greater the number from each batch that were allowed to survive, and the closer she got to finding the elusive magic formula to produce exactly the results wanted in an individual hybrid. By the time Sandeman got to the fourth series of her experiments, she thought she had finally cracked the code and would be able to predict exactly what Jewels each of her creations would have the potential strength to wield, both as adolescents and adults. Her final efforts for Manticore were a series she dubbed X5s and presented to the Committee behind Manticore as the answer they were seeking. As the first line with fully-human appearances and with Sandeman's personal guarantee as to the Jewels they'd be granted at their Birthright Ceremonies, this, she said, was the realization of all their hopes of a way to revitalize the flagging dark bloodlines.

Unfortunately, while Sandeman had been immersed in Manticore's secret labs working towards achieving her promised results, those who had agreed to her plan in the first place began to have more and more doubts and second thoughts prompted by their own personal agendas. With the prospect of new dark Blood that would be so much stronger than they were upon attaining maturity, many began to fear they'd be unable to control the newly-dubbed transgenics when they grew to adulthood. None of those currently in power had any interest in actually handing over their own preeminent status to a bunch of artificial test-tube creations that weren't even fully human. The unexpected answer Sandeman got back to her reveal of the X5s was a request for her to scrap them and start over; if she could produce units to exact specifications, why not add inbuilt controls and docility that would keep them from revolting as their desirable strength was bred into the more general population? The darkest of the blood had always been unduly savage, after all, and no one wished or that aspect of the Blood to return, or perhaps be even worse with the animal DNA mixed into the transgenics.

Sandeman balked. She had come to Manticore for her own private reasons to create the transgenics, and her plans for the future did not include such malleable instruments. While it was a mystery to those who had founded Manticore why the blood were failing, Sandeman was entirely aware of the underlying cause. For thousands of years a secret group of the Blood had worked together to slowly corrupt and gentrify the Blood, pulling them away from properly honoring the Darkness and strengthening and protecting the land and the people with the power entrusted to them. The Conclave were dedicated and patient and their end goal had been for only themselves to be left with enough power to rule over the Blood. Sandeman had been one of them and as committed to their traditions and goals as any, until the day she'd woven a tangled web and seen the ruin that would lie beyond their triumph, for the Blood as a whole and for Sandeman's family in particular.

She tries to reason with Manticore, pulling out very old, very esoteric texts about the nature of the Blood's power she claims to have used as references in her work. She explains patiently that creating such weak-willed vessels for all that dark power will only result in transgenics unable to reach their full mature potential without flaming out. It should be a statement of the obvious, but the Conclave has perverted the teachings of the Blood about who and what they are so well they refuse to believe her anything but stubborn and old-fashioned.

Sandeman had not trusted them enough to explain about the existence of the Conclave before, and cannot risk doing so now as they're threatening to destroy all her hard work. Despite her passionate denials and insistence that creating weaker, more malleable transgenics with the same level of power will utterly fail, Manticore does not listen. Her words are ignored and her refusal to attempt to create a new series to order is met with increasing threats. In the end, she had no choice but to destroy her notes and flee into hiding, holding onto the hope in the absence of her expertise the Committee would have no choice but to work with the transgenic embryos they did have. Among them is hidden her best hope for stopping the plotting of her former allies, thanks to the vision web she'd woven near the end of her production of the X5 series.

Despite how intricately Sandeman had planned the genomes of her creations, she had insisted that her notes on the progress of her experiments remain exclusively her own. Thus with them destroyed, Manticore was left with little idea of what her X5s would become beyond knowing she had created none expected to wear Jewels lighter than Birthright Opal. Likewise, they have no idea what the genetic key to their powers was that Sandeman had so easily unlocked. Without her expertise, Manticore's ruling Committee did exactly as she had predicted and let the X5s be birthed and begin training.

However, they did not give up their own ambitions for creating what they now saw as a better prototype. They simply saw no reason to get rid of the X5s before they had their replacements in production. After her loss from the program, others who had been working as Sandeman's assistants tried to continue with a new X series more in line with the Committee's desire for decreased intelligence and independence. Those scientists were aware that none of them knew exactly how she'd matched the mental, physical, and psychic strength to create balanced individuals, but they did not even understand exactly how delicate of a balance that was until their first few disasters. Even once they stopped producing stillbirths and Blood infants too weak to even wear Jewels, their attempts to dull the instincts and abilities of the X6s and X7s seemed to result in transgenics that were lesser than their older counterparts in all ways. Many did not survive long enough to even reach a Birthright ranking. Of those that did, only a bare handful wore darker Jewels, and of those few, only a couple from each batch survived without showing signs of magical flameouts or psychosis that required them to be put down. In comparison to Sandeman's results, they were a complete disaster.

Their plans to create equally powerful but more malleable creatures thwarted, Manticore fell back to the X5s they had kept as a fail safe. As the scientists had been producing the X6s, 7s, and 8s, the X5s had been subjected to a structured plan of harsh discipline to shape and control them to be be heavily dependent upon and fearful of their technically weaker handlers. While it was considered a risk to train them in their powers, it was clear that no results better than the X5s would be achieved for years, if ever, and losing all of that potential power went against everything the Committee wanted. They could not risk letting more than another generation or two pass by without some progress at a long-term solution being made. And the X5s were everything Sandeman had promised they would be, and more. Psychically strong in rank, many showed signs of developing into the more specialized powers of the Blood's castes. Not only that, they were very intelligent and possessed enhanced physical capabilities well beyond that of humans thanks to their kindred genes. Left with the X5s as their best option, Manticore began making ever more expansive plans as to how to take advantage of their strengths once they reached maturity. As such, training proceeded apace, with heavy doses of conditioning and manipulation at the slightest signs of disobedience. Repeat offenders or continual failures were dissected in the continuing hope of eventually understanding Sandeman's methods. Retaining control was ever the most important aspect for Manticore.

The program for the X5s was thought to be a rousing success in terms of the youngster's progress until nine years in when a group of eleven subjects rebelled and escaped into the night from their barracks. After that disaster, when none of the escapees were retrieved aside from a few terminated mid-escape, their methods of control were reevaluated and a number of changes were made. There was no small amount of irony in the emphasis of the transgenics' training being shifted to attempt to capitalize upon the instincts hardwired into the Blood, just as Sandeman had originally planned. A minor matter of protocol that could be followed or ignored for the lighter-Jeweled blood, for those of darker strength, those ties and restrictions of Protocol and Blood Law were a nigh-unbreakable leash when they were properly invoked. A Black Widow named Elizabeth Renfro was hired to head the new program that saw the young transgenics organized into proto-Courts where the males were fitted with Rings of Obedience and punished for both their own misbehavior and that of the young Queens they were assigned to and the Queens and Healers were given gardens and patients into their care that could be used both as additional bindings and potential hostages. Along with the change in their structure from random groupings to Courts, the pace and intensity of their training was also increased, to keep them from having enough energy to consider further revolt or escape. The Courts themselves were switched in composition at random intervals to make sure none of the transgenics became particularly attached to one another as the escapees had.

They may have been developing powerful Craft and had the training to know how to use it, but their indoctrination was so thorough and the penalties for infractions and disobedience so severe that rarely did any of them try to revolt. It did not help that their keepers were some of the few remaining Blood with darker Jewels. Madame Renfro wore a Sapphire Jewel and lead a small coven of powerful Black Widows who spun tangled webs used to ensnare, brainwash, and punish those few who still chose to rebel or simply failed any of Manticore's multitude of stringent tests. Many transgenics forced into them came out of the re-indoctrination bare husks of their former selves, with no thoughts but to serve Manticore. Colonel Lydecker, who oversaw the training of their more physical and offensive abilities gained from the more animal aspects of the kindred DNA they'd inherited, was a Green Jeweled Warlord who watched dispassionately as many died in those harsh tests he forced them through. As things stood, by the time most of them were old enough to make the Offering, the transgenics were so trained into the mindset of being overpowered and disadvantaged the idea of attempting to challenge their state as prisoners and experiments simply did not occur to them.

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Things were dire for the transgenics on the inside, but the state things for those who had managed to escape and evade their captors was little better. Lydecker's attempts to track them down were relentless, and though a primary reason for their escape had been their attachment to one another, they had immediately separated even before they fully made it past the fences of their prison to make recapturing them that much harder. Zach had been the eldest and he had declared it should be so, and so it was. Even if he, himself, had felt the pull to try to stay together to protect and serve the young witches he thought of as family.

Naturally, it went easier for some of them than others. Krit and Syl stayed together despite Zach's dictates and were able to mostly protect one another, though they never settled in one place for long. Zane, Tinga, and Brin separately found adoptive families that took them in and treated them as their own. Sadly, many of their original adoptive siblings did not fare nearly so well. Vada, a nascent natural Black Widow, was too afraid to seek help to deal with the snake tooth she developed at puberty and died in agony. Kavi ran afoul of a group of other Warlord princes and died the year before he would have made the Offering. Meanwhile, Max, Jondy, Seth, and Ben did a lot of skipping from place-to-place, never feeling quite safe. Jondy ended up cornered by the warlord acting as a landlord at her slum of an apartment building and had her powers broken. Seth died rather than be recaptured by Lydecker, falling to his death off Seattle's space needle. Although Ben and Max both survived to make the Offering, the circumstances under which they did so were not optimal. Both separately came to the conclusion it was necessary to sneak into a Dark Altar for the ceremony, and paranoia about being caught meant they both pulled back before descending to the full strength of their innate potential. Max went from Birthright Red to Ebon-Gray, while Ben went from Sapphire to the same Jewel of Rank, just slightly darker. Of the unit they had considered their family, they had been among those of the deepest potential and at maturity they were the two darkest powers. In the case of Max, although unbeknownst to her, this was not an accident. She figured into Sandeman's plans as her intended Special One, the witch she intended to become Witch and bring about greater changes for the Blood than just regaining the darker ranks of power.

That was a matter only revealed some time later, however, and Max's concerns of the time were far more personal. After feeling like a failure for having cut short her descent to her full strength and forever lost the potential additional power, she needed to be able to feel the safety she was lacking. Even a witch with a Jewel as dark as hers had to deal with being exceedingly vulnerable once a month. She had never liked Zach's edict that they stay separated in the first place, and this only seemed to her as more evidence she and her siblings would be stronger together. After a few months of fruitless searching, she came across a suspicious and incomplete news broadcast about the events leading to Seth's death. It sent her to Seattle, where she hoped to find at least one member of her family. Unfortunately, by the time she arrived, the trail was completely cold thanks to the efforts of Lydecker and Manticore. Still, it's the only indication she'd ever seen of any of her siblings and since she liked the town well enough, so she set down roots for a while. It seemed like as good of a place as any from which to continue her search.

Things weren't easy for her, but she managed to learn to harness the skills she was born with to make herself comfortable enough. What she hadn't learned of Craft from Manticore and the various street gangs she's worked with she can usually accomplish with the physical prowess her part-kindred genes also grant her. It doesn't bother her any that most of her income is from theft. At least, it doesn't ever bother her until her sticky fingers cause her to cross the path of a Summer-Sky warlord from a very old and politically powerful Blood family named Logan Cale.

After she attempts to steal a prize she glimpses displayed in his penthouse apartment window and makes a fairly spectacular getaway, he tracks her down with the single-minded intention of harnessing her skills for his own use. Despite his own aristo family's power, he spends his time and energies on running a clandestine crusade to expose some of the worst abuses of the Blood in power. Thanks to knowledge from a source he does not share with Max, he's just enough aware of the existence of Manticore and its creations to realize how useful to him she could be. Ultimately, he gains her agreement through a combination of flattery, blackmail, guilt, and empty promises of reciprocal help to locate her siblings if she helps him. Despite the crudeness of his tactics and the condescending air he often displays, their knowledge of each other's biggest secrets draws the two of them inexorably towards one another. Over time, their mutual loneliness - combined with a touch of lust and frequent mutual adrenaline highs - has both of them mistaking their arrangement for a truer bond. Any potential it might have had to actually develop into something deeper is constantly stifled by their inability to be honest with each other about anything that really matters and their own perceptions of their inadequacies.

For his part, Cale feels the inadequacy of his much lighter Jewels and permanent scars from a battle he lost on one of his missions before Max came along that even the best healers his family's money could afford were not able to heal completely. On her part, Max has always had to be an outsider ever since she escaped from Manticore, and had never been able to truly fit in regardless of her best efforts. Over time, she'd become convinced it was something fundamentally wrong with her from the kindred DNA Manticore had made her with. Her association with Logan Cale only reinforces this belief, as he endeavors to spend a great deal of time between missions educating her on the proper behavior of witches and their place in the social hierarchy. On the outside, she laughs these lessons off as foolish to begin with, but the intricate dance of Blood Protocol was something she'd not yet learned at Manticore before the escape nor was it of any concern to the thieves and criminals she'd spent most of her formative years with. Like the other transgenics back at Manticore, something in her cried out for the structure and began following Logan's ideas of the Blood's proper place in society. So much so that even when his rules go against her own instincts she internalizes them anyway, so determined to be a good, normal witch. She's convinced that if she can only suppress those parts of her kindred DNA, she can finally feel she belongs among the lighter-Jeweled Blood of the outside world, not having any way to realize the wrongness runs far deeper through what Logan attempts to teach her.

While Max helps Logan to get far better results with many of his missions, the subject of her family brings her nothing but more pain. First, there was Ben. After his own disappointing experience with the Offering to the Darkness, in his isolation and shame at his failure, instead of looking to reconnect as Max had, Ben lost touch with reality and fell deeply into the Twisted Kingdom. He thought the Darkness itself was whispering to him, asking him to test the faith of others and brutally killing those who could not live up to his more-than-human standards of worthiness. His trail of slaughter across the country ultimately comes to Seattle, where Logan finds out about his activities despite Manticore's ongoing cover-up. To Max's great sorrow, when she tracks him down, she cannot talk him back to sanity. Ultimately, she has to end his life as his own last request of her as Lydecker and Mnaticore close in on them, called to the scene by Cale. Max's need for acceptance and connection is such that the betrayal is only a minor hitch in their relationship.

She hopes things will go better when Zach tracks her down on his own initiative, but all he wants from her is for her to leave Seattle and Logan behind, which she does not want to do. She also does not, as a Queen, particularly care for a Warlord Prince trying to order her around for her own good when he's not even pledged to her. She's even less happy with his refusal to put her in contact with any of her other siblings before he leaves town himself. Of course, he does come back when he needs help with situations involving both Tinga and Brin, but neither of those goes at all well either.

Brin ends up back in the hands of Manticore, brainwashed back into the fold. In the course of their reunion with Tinga, they help Lydecker realize Madame Renfro is working behind his back conducting experiments on the X5s to try and discover Sandeman's secrets for herself without the Committee's knowledge or approval. Despite the number of transgenic deaths he himself caused, Lydecker possessed his own twisted version of affection for them, especially those sufficiently without flaws allowed to come to adulthood. In his eyes, with the X5s still being a limited and irreplaceable commodity, Renfro must be stopped. Especially now those transgenics are all old and powerful enough their keepers cannot risk a sufficiently capricious series of punishments and deaths turning them desperate enough to revolt.

He is hindered, however, by her better position with the Committee that allows her to turn them against him. So he turns to the escapees. By a perfect blend of unique insider knowledge and manipulation Lydecker talks them into trying to put a stop to Manticore's power by blowing up the DNA lab under Renfro's watch. Their willingness to work with him is in no small part a result from having found Tinga dead in a huge, sickly tangled web in a secret facility and seen Lydecker's own shock and dismay over it. They are too eager to strike back at the organization that has been a dark shadow over their entire lives to think all that much about the future of their fellows still in Manticore's hands, just the way Lydecker prefers it.

It's the first time a group of them have banded together in a group for the first time since the original escape, and the reunion and their hopes of striking a blow against Manticore have all of their spirits riding high. Unfortunately, though they succeed in blowing up the lab, it does not have the effect they wanted. Madame Renfro has a stranglehold on the Committee behind Manticore beyond what even Lydecker realized, and worse, Max finds herself recaptured in the conflict and sent to be re-indoctrinated into the fold.

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As things had proceeded for the escapees, so did the lives of those transgenics left behind in the prison of Manticore. Always intending to get the most out of each of the embryos carefully constructed by Sandeman, every one of the X5s had cloned copies. After the escape, those who had been made from the same basic sequences as the escapees were put under especially harsh watch for any signs of rebellion in addition to Renfro's general changes. Each of them spent several extra months under thrall of Renfro's webs. A few died, a few more ended up with their powers or their minds broken, and several came out of the experience with no thoughts or personalities of their own - beyond following the decrees of Manticore like mindless automatons. Those few who retained more of themselves learned to hide it well.

The Committee had intended the transgenics to both re-infuse strength back into their bloodlines and, once they saw the true potential of the X5s as individuals, to be able to access that darker strength for their own ends as soon as possible. So long as they're kept under strict control, the X5s are ideal tools to make more overt moves to consolidate their power. To this end, the training the X5s receive becomes even more specialized into the magics of combat and the subtleties of court politics and assassination. Once the Committee's families have achieved better positions and enough crossbred offspring with darker potential have been produced, the X5s can be safely eliminated. Letting such hybrid creations have any place in ruling over the Blood themselves cannot be permitted to even cross the creature's minds.

Despite previous experience with their plans going awry, Manticore's elite still continue to expect to be able to completely control and predict their charges. Regardless of Sandeman's early warnings, they are taken by surprise with the savagery inherent in the darker Blood and a few deadly fights between the Warlord Princes and the guards and between each other are inevitable. Only an even harder crackdown on discipline and a few judicious castrations are enough of a threat to prevent most further incidents from escalating to bloodshed against unacceptable targets. Another unwelcome revelation occurs when more and more X5s get old enough to make the Offering to the Darkness and come away without reaching their full potential. The scientists and geneticists have no idea why, and if the trend carries through to the younger series they produced without Sandeman's guiding hand, the creatures will end up barely darker than their own general population. No amount of punishment seems to change the outcome – in fact, such measures actually seem to lead to worse results in supplicants shown dire consequences being inflicted on their predecessors.

As for the individual X5s themselves, X5-494, twin to the escapee Ben, is one of the X5s who came out of Renfro's webs particularly good at pretending to be obedient. Any real allegiance to Manticore had been destroyed early when he spent so long in the Black Widow's dungeons after the escapees fled through no fault of his own. No matter how many times Manticore tried to drill in loyalty, it had already been broken – like many others, however, he saw no option to do anything but follow orders or be terminated and became very good at playing along and keeping any hint of temper tightly leashed. It isn't until one of his first long term missions outside of Manticore's compound goes disastrously wrong that he gives any real thought to doing anything else.

An old aristo Blood family tied into the research at Manticore asked for assistance in seeing a young Purple Dusk Queen through her Virgin Night and in forming her first Court. As Protocol training was a very large part of the lessons Manticore had imparted to keep the transgenics in line, it had seemed a waste not to take advantage of their operatives being able to fulfill such functions. 494 had already done a few similar missions, on both counts. However, his being chosen for that particular one was a disaster from the moment shortly after his arrival at Berrisford Hall when the two of them were introduced and instantly felt the bond of a Queen and a male that belonged to her.

When the time comes for the temporary contract negotiated with Manticore to expire, 494 tries to explain Manticore is not to be crossed but admits his loyalty is no longer to them and he will fight going back. Manticore, not in the habit of leaving their assets unmonitored, is not pleased at either the rebellion or the hint of aggression behind the declaration more suited to the Warlord Prince he hasn't shown any signs of becoming since before the escape. Things only get worse when Rachel pleads with her father to keep her new Consort, and the soft-hearted Berrisford foolishly tries to hardball them. Manticore does not take kindly to his threats to expose their program, nor do they have any interest in permanently losing the use of their property elsewhere. Rather than give in to the demands of an utterly expendable ally, Manticore operatives incapacitate 494 through the Ring and stage a fatal accident for the Prince and his daughter.

When the incapacitated 494 is returned to Manticore, distraught, and dumped back into the hands of Madame Renfro's Black Widows, he's made to forget the entire incident. Still, even though he did not know what had happened, some lingering instinctual memory of Rachael Berrisford affected him. He was sent to make the Offering shortly thereafter and walked away from the Altar with the same Sapphire Jewel he went in with. There was a great deal of discussion about this failure among the Committee, because few of the other X5s have failed to such a degree as not progressing past their Birthright at all. Ultimately, he avoids any further punishment when they conclude he had been sent to make the attempt far too soon after exiting the re-indoctrination webs. As Lydecker and Renfro were the darkest Jeweled administrators on base and 494 had been carefully kept from forming attachments even more than usual because of Ben's escape, no one of sufficient strength was able to sense the lie of it. At least so long as he never actually used or displayed the uncut Ebon-Gray Jewels he'd received. As much as Manticore would have preferred it otherwise, the Offering to the Darkness was private and had to be conducted in isolation to prevent disruption of any kind.

After the incident with Berrisford, although he had not acted on his expressed thoughts of defection, Manticore takes the precaution of never assigning 494 to any longer term missions where he might get equally attached to the target. Most often, he's sent out as an assassin, but his attractive appearance and relatively dark Birthright see him sent out just as often to serve in the bed for pleasure or seeding. Manticore is simply more careful about making sure the witches in those missions are not likely to develop or foster any attachments.

It would have been tenable enough as a situation for him if Manticore had not caught wind of Ben's murder spree. Since none of the other creations that came from Sandeman's X5 series have gone so spectacularly wrong, the Committee and Renfro have a great deal of curiosity about what went wrong. As Ben remains elusive, Renfro decides to take apart the next best thing, which they already have in hand. Whether 494's extra strength would have done him any good when he realized they were coming to drag him down to the basement for the third time would never be knowable; he'd exhausted his psychic strength on a particularly challenging mission just one day before.

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After the assault on the DNA lab and her subsequent capture, Max and 494 end up paired together as part of a new breeding program instituted by Renfro. Tired of low-quality results from their own efforts at doing things Sandeman's way in a test tube and lacking even the embryos from those ventures, the Committee decides to check the results of breeding the X5s with each other. Although they have already done some crossbreeding between the X5s and deserving bloodlines, their results have been unsatisfactorily mixed there, too, without Sandeman's guiding hand. Their hope is that matching Sandeman's creations with each other might yield more consistent results. When the orders come down from above in general terms, it's nothing new to 494.

Of course, he's not particularly in favor of the arrangement when he hears he's been assigned to a Queen who was one of the escapees that made his early years extra miserable. What he can't so easily shrug off is the hauntingly familiar and irresistible pull of belonging he feels when their eyes meet for the first time. Being bound to a Queen in any way more permanent than the fleeting assignments Manticore makes to keep them all in line is the last thing 494 wants. To be bound even beyond that on a level of Blood and instinct is unthinkable, and he does his best to shove the instincts aside as some weird unfortunate anomaly and get on with the orders at hand. His distaste for the situation only grows when she kicks him in the stomach and bitches him out for entering her cell with no thought to what happens to transgenics who don't follow their orders. For a while his biggest worry is that they're going to try to put him in a court with her; he's not sure he could withstand being punished for all her infractions when he gets the impression she wouldn't bother to give a damn or budge an inch to save him any pain.

For her part, being back in Manticore has always been one of Max's worst nightmares. While she's always enjoyed the benefits of the enhanced abilities encoded in her genetics, she's also seen her instincts as an unnatural foreign thing imposed upon her she should fight against. When she's introduced to the way Manticore has been using those very instincts to control her fellow transgenics, she only becomes more sure she's right. As to 494, she never admits a large part of her need to push him away is because her instincts want to follow Manticore's rules and because 494 is alive and fine when her Ben is not. Throughout her captivity, she constantly clings to fantasies about getting back to Seattle. Her relationship with Logan Cale, which had never been more than a potentiality, becomes even more of a fantasy, enshrined in her mind as something worthy of fighting to get back to. It pushes her to keep scheming to find an escape. It also gives Renfro a lever by which to try and tear Max apart, by engineering a false escape intended to have deadly consequences.

As much as 494 would like nothing further to do with Max, the instincts of the Blood are not so easily denied. After the whole mess with her being sent to kill the Summer-sky warlord she's stuck on goes down and she burns Manticore to the ground, the newly-dubbed Alec can't seem to keep himself from following her back to Seattle. The rules of Protocol between transgenics and ordinaries and transgenics among themselves had been taught as being entirely different at Manticore, and trying to live to the rules of the ordinaries that go so strongly against his own instincts keeps tripping him up. To his own disgust, he makes a few grave mistakes that Max has to bail him out of, and thereafter the bond between them and his own feeling of heavy debt have him stuck in a never-ending cycle of trying to please her. Despite himself, some part of him craves her regard and a place in her Inner Circle, as much as he doesn't want to want a Queen. Manticore had taught that strong Blood males were volatile and dangerous without ties to a Queen, and he hadn't wanted to believe it. On the outside, without even the bare connections Manticore provided, he can't deny it. No matter how many times she disdains him and tells him she's never going to form a Court and certainly not one with a place for him in it, he can't pull himself out of her orbit. And it's not just fear of ending up like Ben, though that has its place, too. He needs her, and he tries to make himself feel better about the fact she clearly doesn't need him by irritating her as much as he can within the rules of his instincts. It's petty but it keeps him from lashing out in more devastating ways.

It does not help that Max and her pet warlord hold Alec in contempt for his part as a double agent in Manticore's plan for Max to kill Cale by a tangled web placed on her skin, rather than her own obliviousness to the obvious ruse. The fact the web remains despite Manticore being nothing more than smoking rubble only seems to solidify her need to blame someone else. Cale's efforts to pretend he finds the connection between the two transgenics nonthreatening are so transparent they only increase Max's need to push Alec further away to fix her floundering relationship.

Even beyond that tangle, Cale is most openly contemptuous of Alec's attempts to adhere to the transgenic's version of the rules of Blood Protocol taught at Manticore. Cale and Max both consider them primitive and antiquated, and Max tries to convince him to change his behavior to match Cale's dictates about the proper deportment of the Blood, but as much as he is drawn to her side, the instincts and rules Manticore taught them are buried too deep for him to change much beyond simply hiding what she doesn't like where she won't know about it. It only works with occasional success, causing even more conflicts between them. He can feel it in the depths of his inner core that the strongest of the Blood cannot function inside Cale's version of the rules, and doesn't understand how Max can't feel that, too.

Of course, what he doesn't know is that despite herself, her constant denials, and his contrary refusal to attempt to be normal the way she wants, Max can't quite help being drawn to Alec just as much as he is to her. She, however, is better at controlling his knowledge of the fact the situation is a mutual one.

There is a bigger picture than the drama between the three of them brewing, however. Manticore's efforts to enhance the strength of the Blood had been a secret. With Manticore gone and her experiments, including some of the earliest ones that did not look at all human, loose in the world, knowledge begins to slowly spread. Many of the Blood, though wanting to be more powerful themselves, have grown over the years to distrust those with much darker powers. The idea of powerful mutants who are part-kindred besides causes the gradual growth of a climate of fear and suspicion. Many of the transgenics are careful to only show their Birthright Jewels, but even that is not always enough to help them blend in.

Over time, more and more of Manticore's creations gather together into the toxic landscape of Terminal City for safety. Used to the system of Courts and Protocol, most of them want to see some kind of Territory Queen's Court formed to rule over all of them in the place of Manticore as an ultimate authority. Max stubbornly insists that there's no need for setting up any official court, though she does begin organizing more and more of the transgenics together to gather supplies and make the abandoned portion of the city they've claimed more habitable. Outside of Max's insistence against courts, many of the transgenics form smaller ones among themselves by their own choices, who come to Max and her associates for help with conflicts against each other. Though Max herself knows nothing of the old ways of nurturing the land and considers it superstitious nonsense, the other Queens who were given duties at Manticore tending to gardens and occasionally nurturing the crops and lands of Manticore's Committee begin making Terminal City slowly less toxic.

While progress is being made, the fear and suspicions of the ordinaries continues to grow. It puts more and more strain on all of the transgenics, rubbing tempers against each other to create additional conflicts. As time passes and the infighting never seems to die down below a dull roar, it becomes apparent even to Max that nothing will help until they have an official Court to revolve around.

That is not the end of the debate, however. Even as she starts being willing to discuss the idea, Max is insistent that Cale will not only be part of her court, but part of her Inner Circle and Queen's Triangle. Both she and the rest of the transgenics consider the matter non-negotiable – but from opposite sides. It's not just because they don't like Cale, and don't think he's strong enough to hold a spot in a true Dark Court, those those are certainly factors. Max is entirely convinced anything to come from Manticore must automatically be wrong, and has consequently been attempting to shove Cale's ideas of how a Court should function down the throats of everyone to come through Terminal City. For the most part, they write off her dogged insistence as a product of all the years she's spent on the outside trying to hide among the lighter-Jeweled Blood. It does not make it grate any less that Cale's very definitive rules of what is right and proper for the Blood and their Queens go against everything their instincts say in a way Manticore's rules never did. Mostly they just agree to her suggestions to her face and do what they want in their own Courts, but forming a ruling Court would not allow for this separation of ideologies to continue. Unbeknownst to Max, the idea is idly circulated of elevating one of the other Queens to a position as the leader of TC, but it goes nowhere. Despite all her faults, Max's dark power and presence exerts a pull as a Queen upon her fellow transgenics that few of them can deny.

Alec finds himself directly in the middle of the conflict most of the time, often acting to smooth ruffled tempers and even to fight an occasional duel or two despite Max's continued dismissal of him. It pricks his pride, hard, that when she does notice one of his many efforts on her behalf she offers that she may let him take a place in one of her outer circles if he can manage to not screw up for a while. That she somehow thinks he's not even more aware than she is that she doesn't have the twelve males necessary to form a complete Inner Circle without Alec only adds to the insult. Allowing her to take nominal control of Terminal City and directly agreeing to Serve are greatly different things in the minds of most of the transgenics. Having to grudgingly ask Alec for his fealty leaves both of them surly and unhappy.

He does at least agree with her other choices of Joshua as her Steward and Zach as her Master of the Guard. The two are maintaining an uneasy truce for the good of the transgenics as a whole when their stalemate is broken by the arrival of Max's clone, Sam, X5-453.

Sam arrives proudly displaying her Black Jewels and a pendant proclaiming her a fully-trained Black Widow, already backed by half a court's worth of transgenics, and with Lydecker himself acting as her Steward. She saunters in and declares they all need to come together to fight for the transgenics' rightful place among the Blood. Max, with Cale in her ear, does not want to fight anyone, even if she didn't have a knee jerk desire to disagree with Lydecker on principle. Working with him to take down Manticore once was not the same thing as trusting him with the transgenics future.

As Max's clone, Sam immediately recognizes Alec as resonating with her, but unlike Max, she does not deny the connection. Immediately after Max refuses to even consider the possibility of working together and storms away with Logan faithfully at her heels, Sam directly approaches him and offers Alec any space he wants in her court. He has no interest in working with Lydecker willingly, doesn't trust her very clever but obvious attempt to break Max's court to take over, and is too loyal to the rest of the court if not Max and her lapdog to switch sides so easily. Even if all these months have left the bond between him and Max a strained and ugly thing he's even more eager to be rid of than when he first felt it. Even if Sam is the first Queen since Max he's felt the slightest pull towards and he'd thought many times after their latest conflict that he'd jump at the chance to bond with any other Queen if he thought it might stick.

Sam and Lydecker, however, are harder, shrewder, and less idealistic than Max and Logan, taking Alec's refusal as a matter of no particular offense and a challenge to be worked through as part of their grander plans for the future. It's pretty obvious to them from nearly the moment they settle in to Terminal City that even if he's on the outer edges of her Court, the Warlord Prince holds a lot of sway with the rest of the transgenics and does a lot of the work of soothing ruffled feathers over Max's Protocol gaffes and providing resources and assistance for the peripheral courts. As such, they continue to make minor but persistent overtures in his direction. Lydecker is smart enough to know they can't force it and Sam is direct enough to not only point out everything Max is doing wrong, but to show him what she intends to do right following the old ways of the Blood – thanks to knowledge gained by Lydecker's discovery of a great deal of Sandeman's research and knowledge, the changes she introduces suit the transgenics even better than the teachings of Manticore. While the presence of Lydecker does their case a fair amount of harm, the Old Ways call to the transgenics' need for structured Protocol that accepts the savagery underlying their nature in a way Max's parroting of Logan's ideas of proper behavior cannot match. The way Terminal City blooms into health around them exceeding even the city outside the fences surrounding them only strengthens their case.

The unstable situation ultimately tips in their favor when Max makes a particularly daft decision about sending the transgenics out on some personal mission of Cale's. It's meant to expose some random Warlord Prince's abuses that have nothing to do with the transgenics' current plight, and it ends in a bloodbath of a conflict with the mark's personal security. The next day, once the casualties have been fully counted, when Lydecker offers Alec the First Escort's Ring again, he takes it.

Although his defection will break her court, Alec is still not so indifferent to Max he wants to break the news to her in front of all the other transgenics. However, when he takes her aside just a day after a decision she has to admit was disastrously wrong and opposed by everyone, which she overruled as Queen's prerogative, she's already unbalanced. A decision that, to her, comes out of nowhere, has her temper getting the better of her. In a cold rage she slams a wild surge of power into him, intending to wound him to the same degree she feels helpless and hurt by both the situation and the defection.

She only has a second to be horrified by her own actions before she's shocked by the power rebounding off of shields strong enough to deflect her attack hidden underneath the Sapphire ones her power sliced easily through. For the first time she verbally acknowledges their connection and declares that he is _hers_ , but Alec throws back that he resonates just as much with Sam, sure Max cannot know this is a lie. At Max's continued insistence he rethink the decision for the good of them all, Alec's own rising temper has him spitting out that he was stupid to ever think it was a good idea to serve a Queen willingly leashing herself to a Summer-Sky prick who isn't even transgenic and doesn't know the first thing about being part of a Dark Court.

She visibly bites back her ire for one last ditch effort, telling him she's been breaking out in runes. She drops a sight-shield around the skin of her arms to prove she's not making it up. Logan has been translating them as best he can and says they're a message from Sandeman about how the transgenics have a mission to save the Blood as a whole. The powerful Black Widow had seen a future in her tangled webs where the transgenics would have to band together lead by a Dark Court headed by an incarnation of Witch. She insists he's dooming them all by breaking her Court.

Not only does this leave Alec unmoved, the fact she's clearly been hiding this information from him for some time is infuriating. When she admits she's not told anyone else in the Court either other than Cale, he lets the anger he feels have rein and suggests spitefully the runes clearly mean Sam, who wears the Black, and it means little Sandeman decided to use her for a billboard. Max starts to retort something angry herself, but is stopped by a rime of ice flashing over all the nearby surfaces in the room. Realizing that she's pushed Alec's temper to the breaking point, she concedes for the moment and backs off.

Too stubborn and too used to having him bend to her will, however, Max takes her complaints to Logan. That conversation leads to a second confrontation two days later where Logan tries to corner the man and says there are very old stories where Witch wasn't always a Black Jeweled Queen or even fully human in the past. Furthermore, he insists that Alec must stay on Max's side now, because of something specific in her runes. He's been having trouble because they're inscribed in the Old Tongue of the Blood, which is almost entirely lost. However a passage he'd been sure he'd read wrong before about a tilted mirror resonating on the same web of power as the Queen to destroy the destroyers must mean Alec. Yet another piece of information kept to themselves does nothing to sway Alec, and years of learning to leash his temper in Manticore has him storming off, telling the two of them they can go screw themselves for only caring about anyone else when they're needed for something.

Drawn by the thrumming dark power and angrily raised voices, several of the transgenics are there to witness this confrontation. While Alec may not be persuaded in the least by Logan's argument, Sam and Lydecker are more willing to listen. Lydecker has previously spent quite some time researching into Sandeman, trying to figure out what had motivated the woman to build the transgenics and where she has gone. The availability of a message direct from the source is too compelling to not find some way to work together. Alec, however, has not sufficiently cooled that when Max insists he not leave her Court he can refrain from insisting that if he'd wanted to be stuck serving a witch he didn't trust he might as well have stayed at Manticore with Renfro. As the crowd of transgenics grumbles uneasily, Sam implores any of the many males who have offered to serve in her Court since her arrival to trade places with Alec. Max, if she's still quite angry, is not so unaware of her tenuous grip that she spurns the grudging agreement of the warlord who volunteers. At least not openly. On the inside, she adds it to her personal tally of reasons she can't stand Alec, really.

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* * *

Inside the fence, the tensions are mostly controlled by their need to work together. Outside the fence, things are not so controlled. If the Committee had been unwilling to allow the transgenics any power in ruling the Blood, the general population was appalled by their very existence. The stories on the news described them as nothing more than a complete perversion of the Blood, even lesser than the kindred. Allowing them to potentially pollute the remaining Blood of the darker bloodlines was a grave mistake; each and every one of them should be put down with extreme prejudice.

The extremist stance was not purely a matter of mob mentality that had appeared out of nowhere. The information linked out of Manticore about the transgenics existence had not happened by chance, in the same way the gradual decline of the Blood that had caused the formation of Manticore in the first place had not happened by chance. The group that Sandeman had formerly been a part of, that secretive Conclave, were not about to let the Black Widow's creations have any chance of spoiling their plans to rule as the sole remaining Blood. After generations of gradually destroying and corrupting the Blood, the Conclave are too close to finally having their triumph. There is one last step, now that the rest of the Blood have been stripped of the knowledge and weakened of the ability to fight back. One last major working of power will sever the rest of the Blood from their connection to the Darkness in a bare few months' time when a comet colloquially known as The Dragon's Tail lights the sky overhead. The only remaining threat to their ultimate success lies among Sandeman's hybrid creations. Not only do they have a level of strength the rest of the Blood can no longer muster to match the Conclave members on an equal level, but all the knowledge of the ritual that exists is encoded directly into one particular transgenic's DNA. More than that, even, Sandeman saw most of the details of a complex counter working in her vision which she gave over to the young Queen she'd created to save them all.

Of course, Sandeman had been no less careful fleeing the Conclave than she had been in evading Manticore's grasp, and while they are convinced her exit meant she intended to work against them, they know none of the particulars. With the extent to which they've invaded the most powerful levels of aristo society, however, it's not necessary for them to know Sandeman's plans to endanger them. They set their sights on destroying as many of the transgenics as possible with a particular focus on any Queens and Black Widows that could unite the creatures or see their plans in a tangled web. Many of Sandeman's creations are killed in their purges, and even more by the rest of the Blood spun up into a frenzy of outrage at their very existence.

Through all their sometimes desperate efforts to keep themselves alive, the transgenics do their best to hold together. As more and more of Max's runes are translated and make it clear she is Sandeman's chosen one, gradually the infighting between factions falls off and all the smaller courts line up behind Max, even Sam's. While it draws the overall cause of the transgenics together, the continued evidence that Alec plays just as much of a part in the working as a direct balance to Max pushes the two of them personally even further apart. Never really reconciled over her secrecy or his open repudiation of her, the idea Sandeman built them as a matched set is anathema. They maintain the barest civility when they have to meet to discuss the latest details, and even that falls further apart when Logan becomes increasingly suspicious and jealous of Max's time and attention. Still determined that once this whole mess is over she will make a normal life for herself centered on him, Max becomes even more harsh to Alec, desperate to prove to her someday Consort that the other man can never come between them whatever Sandeman may have intended.

Gradually the runes spell out more and more of the details, giving them a time when the spell has to happen to counteract the Conclave's efforts, how Sam should be the one to seal it to a web to hold the immense power involved. How all the transgenics should be involved with Alec and Max holding mirrored anchoring threads of the overall working, channeling the power of everyone else while Sam holds the web together and channels off the backlash safely. It will be a more complicated working than any they've ever done, but there isn't much choice. Even if some of the transgenics would rather let the rest of the Blood who want them dead be killed themselves, if the Conclave succeeds, they will be the only other ones left. Against an organization thousands of years old, they will doubtlessly be outnumbered and eventually destroyed themselves.

Once the general details of the spell are known, Max pulls back to spend more time with Logan. While they all hope it will go well, a working of this much power is always dangerous in and of itself. In contrast, Alec throws himself even further into the planning, going over every detail of how the spell is meant to work as Sam prepares the webs through which all of their combined power will be channeled. He wants nothing more than for the whole thing to be over with, desperate for a future where he can finally get away from a witch he still feels an inexorable pull towards and more than a little heartsick he seems to have been personally created just to serve as the keystone for a spell. He has nothing waiting for him on the other side as a promise, but anything has to be better than being stuck here.

They all gather in the largest building Terminal City has to offer the day before the night the comet is due to skim closest to the atmosphere overhead. It takes hours of careful work to anchor all of the transgenics present by blood and mind through either Max or Alec, distaff or spear. As the fateful hour as dictated by the runes Sandeman wrote in Max's DNA approach, they're all tired and quiet. The three central actors of the spell have moved off into a small former office where the large web Sam had carefully constructed waits, and as the final step, she keys the two of them, and through them all of the other transgenics, into the working.

It's been a strange sensation, being keyed into all of the other transgenics, and though the effect has gradually muted over the course of the afternoon as more and more were added into the spell, the activation of the working is a whole new oddity. He can feel the power flowing through him, through the spell, and even as he can feel the spell building, he can feel an answering resistance against it that must be the Conclave's own working.

He can feel it when the building power behind the transgenics reaches a crescendo, and how the power opposing them continues to grow. The three of them exchange a worried look and Sam calls to Lydecker to have the transgenics in the other side funnel in more of their power. Alec can feel it increase, but it doesn't change the sense he has that it isn't enough. That it isn't going to be enough.

Alec paid attention to all the nuances of the spell, and knows exactly how each part of it ties together. All the power is focused through him, amplified through him, and if he throws everything he has into it – Sam has to handle the backlash. Max didn't learn any more than she needed to about the spell, and has Logan waiting for her on the other side. Alec has nothing to lose but having to be stuck here fighting a losing war with the Conclave if this spell doesn't work. Hellsfire, Logan had said the spell wouldn't work without him, specifically, not just him and Max. Maybe even this specifically was what he was created to do? There's a certain kind of power in a blowout, after all. With no more thought and little time to lose, he turns inward, descending as far as he dares into the Abyss and turning his power back into the working. He can feel it burning through him, ripping through his mind, Jewels, and body, draining everything. He can also feel the spell as a whole gaining, gaining, and passing the resistance against it and knows if he can just hold together a little longer it'll be enough. He won't get to see it, but it will be enough.

Fighting through the agony to add a few more minutes, seconds, instants is taking up his whole concentration, until he feels a sharp and sudden tug coming from a different direction. He's too lost in the power to puzzle through what it could be before a sharp mental command from Max follows, telling him he has to stop. He refuses and she prods harder. Irritated and exhausted, he doesn't even form the return thought into proper words, simply sends the awareness this is what Sandeman meant him for and that he's already drained so much there's no point in turning back. She doesn't prod again, she slams her entire will into him, latching on and he can feel her own power poring in as she swears if he doesn't pull back this instant she'll sabotage the whole spell and kill them both, he doesn't get to do this to her.

Baffled by why she suddenly cares, he can still feel her absolute conviction that she will do what she says and it shocks him enough to let go for just a second. It's a second that Max has been waiting for, and she yanks him upward out of the danger zone and keeps pouring power back across to him that eases a way a little of the feeling of being a balloon on the verge of popping from over inflation. Tentatively reaching back to the spell, he can feel that it has more than enough power if they can just hold it, and they do, until all resistance falls away and the spell is done. The whole time he can feel Max's awareness hovering, making sure he doesn't put anything else of his own into the spell. Once it's done, he intends to wake up, but falls into darkness instead. In the outside world, the comet comes and goes without any death toll or loss of powers, and most of the Blood sleep on in ignorant bliss.

Alec wakes up in Terminal City's makeshift infirmary a week later, one of their strongest resident Healers and Max hovering over him. They both call him an idiot. Before he can feel too abused or insulted, Max exchanges a look with the other woman who leaves them alone. Haltingly, Max explains the spell worked and they haven't yet seen any significant reaction from the Conclave. She meanders through an explanation of various plans the transgenics are working on to support them all and perhaps gain some allies on the outside while Alec waits for her to get to the point. She finally trails off and there is silence for a long moment before she swears vehemently if he ever tries anything like that again she'll kick his ass. When he tries to object, no less confused about her anger than he was before, she talks over him, slowly but firmly explaining about her fear and hatred of her own instincts because they were connected to Manticore. How she'd resented the connection between them for the same reason and Ben's death on top of it. How she hasn't been completely blind to how drastically Sam and Lydecker's knowledge of the old ways have transformed Terminal City and how poor the rest of the land really is in comparison. Sandeman left them to deal with a much bigger problem than just thwarting one scheme of the cult's, and as her mirror she expects him to stick around and pull his weight.

Looking into the future, they still have to deal with a world that doesn't want them alive. Worse, they have to somehow convince those same members of the Blood to go back to the old and savage ways that connect them to each other and the land to bolster their powers without creating some other quick fix scheme. And the cult is still out there, willing and able to spend another two thousand years for their next chance when the comet cycles by once more. But for the moment, they've won enough time to try and that's a place to start.

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A/N: Ultimately, I'm mainly posting this to complete the bingo. I never felt like I could find a good tonal pivot point between reporting a history rehashing Sandeman's work and the canon as changed by the fusion and telling an active story of the resolution of the cult plot. In the end, I chose to try and keep the whole thing in a detached style, but it notably sacrifices detail this way. I hope it was still entertaining to somebody out there, and I always appreciate feedback.


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